Introduction

We would like to thank Cougar for supplying the review sample.

For most of you the word "cougar" refers either to the animal or to an older woman who seeks sexual relations with much younger men. We are, thankfully, an IT site so neither of those definitions apply to today’s review sample by Cougar: a PSU, chassis, and cooling products company that has very close ties with HEC/Compucasem through their power products. In fact, this is the first Cougar unit that we test here on TPU, and we are really anxious to see how it will perform on our test bench.

The PowerX-550 will be the test subject of this review, and we are pretty sure most of you are keen to figure out how good (or bad) it actually is, since it plays ball in the mainstream category. But we'd better take things from the start: as you can figure from its model number, this PSU has a capacity of 550 W. Its other features include a non-modular cabling design, compact dimensions, two PCIe connectors and a nicely, at least for our taste, colored finish. The lack of modular cables will surely be a great turnoff to most users, but the first thing a company usually does away with if it wants to restrict production costs is the modular cabling design, since it apparently doesn't come cheap. We admit that we fancy modular cables, but if we had to choose between components of lower quality, especially capacitors, mosfets etc., we would also make do without the modular design to achieve a lower price. Even with native cables, the PSU will do its job just fine, although cable management will be much harder. Its performance would, on the other hand, suffer with lower quality components, especially in the long run.